Judith Butler is the Maxine Elliott Professor in Rhetoric and

Comparative Literature at Berkeley. Who Owns Kafka? was

the first of this years LRB Winter Lectures, delivered in
February at the British Museum.

Who Owns Kafka?

Judith Butler

00:00

57:16

An ongoing trial in Tel Aviv is set to determine who will have

stewardship of several boxes of Kafkas original writings, including
primary drafts of his published works, currently stored in Zurich
and Tel Aviv. As is well known, Kafka left his published and
unpublished work to Max Brod, along with the explicit instruction
that the work should be destroyed on Kafkas death. Indeed, Kafka
had apparently already burned much of the work himself. Brod
refused to honour the request, although he did not publish
everything that was bequeathed to him. He published the
novels The Trial, The Castleand Amerika between 1925 and 1927.
In 1935, he published the collected works, but then put most of the
rest away in suitcases, perhaps honouring Kafkas wish not to have
it published, but surely refusing the wish to have it destroyed.
Brods compromise with himself turned out to be consequential,
and in some ways we are now living out the consequences of the
non-resolution of Kafkas bequest.
Brod fled Europe for Palestine in 1939, and though many of the
manuscripts in his custody ended up at the Bodleian Library in
Oxford, he held on to a substantial number of them until his death
in 1968. It was to his secretary Esther Hoffe, with whom he
appears to have had an amorous relationship, that Brod
bequeathed the manuscripts, and she kept most of them until her
own death in 2007 at the age of 101. For the most part Esther did
as Max did, holding on to the various boxes, stashing them in
vaults, but in 1988 she sold the manuscript of The Trial for $2
million, at which point it became clear that one could turn quite a
profit from Kafka. What no one could have predicted, however, is
that a trial would eventually take place after Esthers death in
which her daughters, Eva and Ruth, would claim that no one needs
to inventory the materials and that the value of the manuscripts
should be determined by their weight quite literally, by what they
weigh. As one of the attorneys representing Hoffes estate
explained: If we get an agreement, the material will be offered for
sale as a single entity, in one package. It will be sold by weight
Theyll say: Theres a kilogram of papers here, the highest bidder

will be able to approach and see whats there. The National

Library [of Israel] can get in line and make an offer, too.
How Kafka turned into such a commodity indeed a new gold
standard is an important question, and one to which I shall
return. We are all too familiar with the way in which the value of
literary and academic work is currently being established by
quantitative means, but I am not sure anyone has yet proposed
that we simply weigh our work on the scales. But to begin with, let
us consider who the parties are to the trial and the various claims
they make. First, there is the National Library of Israel, which
claims that Esther Hoffes will should be set aside, since Kafka does
not belong to these women, but either to the public good or else
to the Jewish people, where these sometimes seem to be the
same. David Blumberg, chairman of the board of directors of the
National Library, puts the case this way: The library does not
intend to give up on cultural assets belonging to the Jewish people
Because it is not a commercial institution and the items kept
there are accessible to all without cost, the library will continue its
efforts to gain transfer of the manuscripts that have been found. It
is interesting to consider how Kafkas writings can at once
constitute an asset of the Jewish people and at the same time
have nothing to do with commercial activities. Oren Weinberg, the
CEO of the National Library, made a similar remark more recently:
The library regards with concern the new position expressed by
the executors, who want to mix financial considerations into the
decision as to whom the estate will be given. Revealing the
treasures, which have been hidden in vaults for decades, will serve
the public interest, but the position of the executors is liable to
undermine that measure, for reasons that will benefit neither Israel
nor the world.
So it seems we are to understand Kafkas work as an asset of the
Jewish people, though not a restrictively financial one. If Kafka is
claimed as a primarily Jewish writer, he comes to belong primarily
to the Jewish people, and his writing to the cultural assets of the
Jewish people. This claim, already controversial (since it effaces
other modes of belonging or, rather, non-belonging), becomes all
the more so when we realise that the legal case rests on the
presumption that it is the state of Israel that represents the Jewish
people. This may seem a merely descriptive claim, but it carries

with it extraordinary, and contradictory, consequences. First, the

claim overcomes the distinction between Jews who are Zionist and
Jews who are not, for example Jews in the diaspora for whom the
homeland is not a place of inevitable return or a final destination.
Second, the claim that it is Israel that represents the Jewish people
has domestic consequences as well. Indeed, Israels problem of
how best to achieve and maintain a demographic majority over its
non-Jewish population, now estimated to constitute more than 20
per cent of the population within its existing borders, is predicated
on the fact that Israel is not a restrictively Jewish state and that, if
it is to represent its population fairly or equally, it must represent
both Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. The assertion that Israel
represents the Jewish people thus denies the vast number of Jews
outside Israel who are not represented by it, either legally or
politically, but also the Palestinian and other non-Jewish citizens of
that state. The position of the National Library relies on a
conception of the nation of Israel that casts the Jewish population
outside its territory as living in the Galut, in a state of exile and
despondency that should be reversed, and can be reversed only
through a return to Israel. The implicit understanding is that all
Jews and Jewish cultural assets whatever that might mean
outside Israel eventually and properly belong to Israel, since Israel
represents not only all Jews but all significant Jewish cultural
production. I will simply note that there exists a great deal of
interesting commentary on this problem of the Galut by scholars
such as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, who, in his extraordinary work on
exile and sovereignty, argues that the exilic is proper to Judaism
and even to Jewishness, and that Zionism errs in thinking that exile
must be overcome through the invocation of the Law of Return, or
indeed, the popular notion of birthright. Exile may in fact be a
point of departure for thinking about cohabitation and for bringing
diasporic values back to that region. This was also no doubt
Edward Saids point when, in Freud and the Non-European, he
called for the exilic histories of both Jews and Palestinians to serve
as the basis for a new polity in Palestine.
The Galut is thus not a fallen realm in need of redemption, even
though it is precisely what state and cultural forms of Zionism seek
to overcome through extending rights of return to all those born of
Jewish mothers and now through claiming significant works by

those who happen to be Jews as Jewish cultural capital that, as

such, rightly belongs to the Israeli state. Indeed, if the argument of
the National Library were successful, then the representative claim
of the state of Israel would be greatly expanded. As Antony Lerman
put it in the Guardian, if
the National Library claims the legacy of Kafka for the Jewish state, it,
and institutions like it in Israel, can lay claim to practically any preHolocaust synagogue, artwork, manuscript or valuable ritual object
extant in Europe. But neither Israel as a state, nor any state or public
institution, has such a right. (And while its true that Kafka is a key figure
of the Jewish cultural past, as one of the worlds most significant authors
whose themes find echoes in many countries and cultures, Israels
proprietary attitude is surely misplaced.)

Although Lerman laments the implied subservience of European

Jewish communities to Israel, the problem has broader global
implications: if the diaspora is conceived as a fallen realm,
unredeemed, then all cultural production by those who are
arguably Jewish according to the rabbinic laws governing the Law
of Return will be subject to posthumous legal appropriation,
provided that the work is regarded as an asset. And this brings
me to my third point, namely, that where there are assets, there
are also liabilities. So it is not enough for a person or a work to be
Jewish; they have to be Jewish in a way that can be capitalised on
by the Israeli state as it currently fights on many fronts against
cultural delegitimation. An asset, one imagines, is something that
enhances Israels world reputation, which many would allow is in
need of repair: the wager is that the world reputation of Kafka will
become the world reputation of Israel. But a liability, and a Jewish
one, is someone whose person or work, arguably Jewish,
constitutes a deficit of some kind; consider, for instance, the recent
efforts to prosecute Israeli human rights organisations, such as
Btselem, for publicly documenting the number of civilian
casualties in the war against Gaza. Perhaps Kafka might be
instrumentalised to overcome the loss of standing that Israel has
suffered by virtue of its ongoing illegal occupation of Palestinian
land. It matters that Israel comes to own the work, but also that
the work is housed within the established territory of the state, so
that anyone who seeks to see and study that work must cross
Israels border and engage with its cultural institutions. And this is

also problematic, not only because citizens from several countries

and non-citizens within the Occupied Territories are not allowed to
cross that border, but also because many artists, performers and
intellectuals are currently honouring the cultural and academic
boycott, refusing to appear in Israel unless their host institutions
voice a strong and sustained opposition to the occupation. The
Kafka trial not only takes place against this political backdrop, but
actively intervenes in its reconfiguration: if the National Library in
Jerusalem wins its case, to have access to the unpublished and
unseen materials of Franz Kafka one will have to defy the boycott
and will have implicitly to acknowledge the Israeli states right to
appropriate cultural goods whose high value is assumed to convert
contagiously into the high value of Israel itself. Can poor Kafka
shoulder such a burden? Can he really help the Israeli state
overcome the bad press of the occupation?
It is strange that Israel might be relying on the fragile remains of
Franz Kafka to establish its cultural claim to work that is produced
by that class of persons we might call arguably Jewish. And it
probably also matters that the adversaries here are the daughters
of the one-time mistress of Max Brod, a committed Zionist, whose
own political interests seem to be vastly overshadowed by the
prospect of financial gain. Their pursuit of a profitable outcome
seems to know no national boundaries and to honour no particular
claims of national belonging like capitalism itself. In fact, the
German Literature Archive would probably be in a better position to
pay the sums imagined by these sisters. In a desperate move, the
Israeli counsel for the National Library sought to debunk the
ownership claims of the sisters by producing a letter by Brod
accusing his paramour of disrespecting him, and insisting that he
would prefer to leave these materials to someone who regarded
him as a person of significance. Since the letter names no such
people, it might be hard to sustain the claim that it overrides the
explicit stipulation of the will. We shall see whether this document
of a lovers quarrel holds up in court.
The National Librarys most powerful adversary is the German
Literature Archive in Marbach, which, interestingly, has retained
Israeli lawyers for the purposes of the trial. Presumably, with Israeli
counsel, this does not have the appearance of a German-Jewish

fight, and so does not recall that other trial Eichmanns in 1961
in which the judge suddenly broke out of Hebrew and into German
to address Eichmann directly. That moment caused a controversy
over the question of what language belongs in an Israeli court of
law, and of whether Eichmann should have been accorded such a
courtesy. Several German scholars and newspapers have recently
argued that Marbach is the proper home for Kafkas newly
discovered writings. Marbach, they point out, already owns the
largest collection of Kafka manuscripts in the world, including the
manuscript of The Trial, which it bought for 3.5 million German
marks at Sothebys in 1988. These scholars argue against further
fragmentation of the oeuvre, and point to the superior capacity of
the Marbach facility to conserve such materials. There seems to be
a sense that Germany might be, all in all, a more secure location.
But of course another part of the argument is that Kafka belongs to
German literature and, specifically, to the German language. And
though there is no attempt to say that he belongs to Germany as
one of its past or virtual citizens, it seems that Germanness here
transcends the history of citizenship and pivots on the question of
linguistic competence and accomplishment. The argument of the
German Literature Archive effaces the importance of
multilingualism for Kafkas formation and for his writing. (Indeed,
would we have the Babel parables without the presumption of
multilingualism, and would communication falter so insistently in
his works without that backdrop of Czech, Yiddish and German
converging in Kafkas world?)
In focusing on just how perfectly German his language is, the
archive joins in a long and curious tradition of praise for Kafkas
pure German. George Steiner lauded the translucency of Kafkas
German, its stainless quiet, remarking that his vocabulary and
syntax are those of utmost abstention from waste. John Updike
referred to the stirring purity of Kafkas prose. Hannah Arendt, as
well, wrote that his work speaks the purest German prose of the
century. So although Kafka was certainly Czech, it seems that fact
is superseded by his written German, which is apparently the most
pure or, shall we say, purified? Given the history of the valuation
of purity within German nationalism, including National Socialism,
it is curious that Kafka should be made to stand for this rigorous
and exclusionary norm. In what ways must Kafkas multilingualism

and his Czech origins be purified in order to have him stand for a
pure German? Is what is most remarkable or admirable about him
that he seems to have purified himself, exemplifying the selfpurifying capacities of the Auslnder?
It is interesting that these arguments about Kafkas German are
recirculating now, just as Angela Merkel has announced the failure
of multiculturalism in Germany and marshalled as evidence the
further claim that new immigrants, and indeed their children and
grandchildren, fail to speak German correctly. She has publicly
admonished such communities to rid themselves of every accent
and to integrate into the norms of the German linguistic
community (a complaint quickly countered by Jrgen Habermas).
Surely, Kafka could be a model of the successful immigrant, though
he lived only briefly in Berlin, and clearly did not identify even with
the German Jews. If Kafkas new works are recruited to the
Marbach archive, then Germany will be fortified in its effort to shift
its nationalism to the level of language; the inclusion of Kafka takes
place for the very same reason that less well-spoken immigrations
are denounced and resisted. Is it possible that fragile Kafka could
become a norm of European integration?
We find in Kafkas correspondence with his lover Felice Bauer, who
was from Berlin, that she is constantly correcting his German,
suggesting that he is not fully at home in this second language.
And his later lover, Milena Jesensk, who was also the translator of
his works into Czech, is constantly teaching him Czech phrases he
neither knows how to spell nor to pronounce, suggesting that
Czech, too, is also something of a second language. In 1911, he is
going to the Yiddish theatre and understanding what is said, but
Yiddish is not a language he encounters very often in his family or
his daily life; it remains an import from the east that is compelling
and strange. So is there a first language here? And can it be
argued that even the formal German in which Kafka writes what
Arendt called purest German bears the signs of someone
entering the language from its outside? This was the argument in
Deleuze and Guattaris essay Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.
Indeed, this quarrel seems to be an old one, one that Kafka himself
invokes in a letter to Felice in October 1916 with reference to Max

Brods essay on Jewish writers, Our Writers and the Community,

published in Der Jude.
And incidentally, wont you tell me what I really am; in the last Neue
Rundschau, Metamorphosis is mentioned and rejected on sensible
grounds, and then the writer says: There is something fundamentally
German about Ks narrative art. In Maxs article on the other hand: Ks
stories are among the most typically Jewish documents of our time.

A difficult case, Kafka writes. Am I a circus rider on two horses?

Alas, I am no rider, but lie prostrate on the ground.
Let us consider some more of Kafkas writings his letters, some
diary entries, two parables and a story in order to cast light on
the question of his belonging, his views on Zionism and his more
general ways of thinking about reaching (and failing to reach) a
destination. So far as were concerned with assessing the rights of
ownership claimed in the trial, it probably doesnt matter whether
or not Kafka was a Zionist or whether he planned seriously to move
to Palestine. The fact is that Brod was a Zionist and brought Kafkas
work along, even though Kafka himself never went, and never
really planned to. He understood Palestine as a destination, but
referred to the plan to go there as dreams. It was not simply that
he lacked the will, but that he had a stopping ambivalence about
the entire project. What I hope to show is that a poetics of nonarrival pervades this work and affects, if not afflicts, his love
letters, his parables about journeys, and his explicit reflections on
both Zionism and on the German language. I can understand that
one might want to look specifically at what Kafka wrote about trials
to see what light might be shed on the contemporary trial by his
writings, but there are some differences that need to be remarked.
This current trial is about ownership and rests in part on claims of
national and linguistic belonging, but most of the trials and
procedures that Kafka writes about involve unfounded allegations
and nameless guilt. Now Kafka has himself become property, if not
chattel (literally, an item of tangible movable or immovable
property not attached to land), and the debate over his final
destination is taking place, ironically, in family court. The very
question of where Kafka belongs is already something of a scandal
given the fact that the writing charts the vicissitudes of nonbelonging, or of belonging too much. Remember: he broke every
engagement he ever had, he never owned an apartment, and he

asked his literary executor to destroy his papers, after which that
contractual relation was to have ended. So arrangements outlived
their original purposes and their intended timespan. Even though
Kafkas job was to adjudicate administrative insurance claims and
binding contracts, his personal life was curiously void of them,
except for an occasional contract to publish. Of course, I am
prepared to accept that the legal management of his papers
requires a decision regarding their stewardship, and that this
problem of legal ownership has to be solved so the papers can be
inventoried and made accessible. But if we turn to his writing to
help us sort through this mess, we may well find that his writing is
instead most pertinent in helping us to think through the limits of
cultural belonging, as well as the traps of certain nationalist
trajectories that have specific territorial destinations as their goal.
There is no doubt that Kafkas Jewishness was important, but this
in no way implied any sustained view on Zionism. He was
immersed in Jewishness, but also sought to survive its sometimes
pressing social demands. In 1911 he went to the Yiddish theatre
nearly every week and described in detail what he saw there. In
the subsequent years he read greedily as he puts it LHistoire
de la littrature Judo-Allemande by Meyer Pines, which was full of
Hasidic tales, followed by Fromers Organismus des Judentums,
which details rabbinic Talmudic traditions. He attended musical
events at the Bar Kokhba Society, read portions of Kaballah and
discussed them in his diaries, studied Moses Mendelssohn and
Sholem Aleichem, read several Jewish magazines, attended
lectures on Zionism and plays in Yiddish, and listened to Hebrew
stories in translation. Apparently, on 25 February 1912, Kafka
delivered a lecture on Yiddish, though I have not been able to find
a copy. Perhaps it is stuffed in a box in Tel Aviv awaiting legal
adjudication.
Alongside this impressive immersion in Jewish things perhaps we
could call it a mode of being enveloped Kafka also voiced
scepticism about that mode of social belonging. Hannah Arendt,
whose own sense of belonging was similarly vexed (and became a
subject of dispute with Gershom Scholem), made famous one of
Kafkas quips about the Jewish people: My people, provided that I
have one. As Louis Begley has recently made clear in a quite
candid biographical essay, Kafka remained not only in two minds

about Jewishness, but sometimes quite clearly torn apart. What

have I in common with Jews? he wrote in a diary entry in 1914. I
have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand
very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe. Sometimes his
own remarks on Jews were harsh, if not violent, when, for instance,
he calls the Jewish people lizards. In a letter to Milena, a non-Jew,
he crosses over into a genocidal and suicidal fantasy in which no
one can finally breathe any more:
I could rather reproach you for having much too good an opinion of the
Jews whom you know (including myself) there are others! sometimes
Id like to cram them all as Jews (including myself) into the drawer of the
laundry chest, then wait, then open the drawer a little, to see whether all
have already suffocated, if not, to close the drawer again and go on like
this to the end.

Jewishness is linked up, time and again, with the possibility of

breathing. What have I in common with the Jews? I am lucky that I
can breathe at all. So is it the Jews who make it difficult for him to
breathe, or is it Kafka who imagines depriving the Jews of breath?
Kafkas suffocation fantasy reiterates a phantasmatic vacillation of
size that we also find, for instance, in The Judgment. In the fantasy,
Kafka is impossibly large, larger than all the Jews he imagines
putting into the drawer. And yet, he is also in the drawer, which
makes him unbearably small. In The Judgment, the father is by
turns huge and tiny: at one moment the son, Georg, remarks that
when erect, he is so tall that his hand lightly touches the ceiling,
but in a previous moment, the father is reduced to the size of a
child and Georg carries him to bed. The son towers over the father
only to be sentenced to death by the force of the latters words.
Where is Kafka located in that fantasy of suffocation, and where is
Georg? They are subject to a perpetual vacillation in which no one
finally is sustained in a manageable scale. In the suffocation
fantasy, Kafka is both agent and victim. But this persistent duality
goes unrecognised by those who have used the letter to call him a
self-hating Jew. Such a conclusion is no more warranted by the
vacillations in his text than is the triumphant claim that Kafkas
occasionally admiring remarks about Zionism make him a Zionist.
(He is, after all, flirting in some of those instances.) The suffocation

fantasy, written in 1920, is perhaps most usefully understood in

relation to a letter to Felice written four years earlier, after reading
Arnold Zweigs play Ritual Murder in Hungary (1916). The play
enacts a drama from 1897 based on the blood libel against the
Jews. Jews in a Hungarian village are accused of using a butchers
knife to kill Christians and then using their blood to make
unleavened bread. In the play, the accused are brought to court,
where the charges are dismissed. An anti-Jewish riot breaks out on
the streets and violence is directed against Jewish businesses and
religious institutions. After reading Zweigs play, Kafka wrote to
Felice: At one point I had to stop reading, sit down on the sofa, and
weep. Its years since I wept. The butchers knife, or knives like it,
then reappear in his diaries and letters, and even several times in
the published fiction: in The Trial, for instance, and again, most
vividly, in A Country Doctor. The play gives us some sense of the
limits of law, even the strange way that the law gives way to a
lawlessness it cannot control.
The fact that Kafka wept at the story of false accusations indeed,
that few accounts made him weep as this one did may strike us
as surprising. The tone of the The Trialis, after all, one in which a
false or obscure accusation against K. is relayed in the most
neutral terms, without resonating affect. It seems that the grief
avowed in the letters is precisely what is put out of play in the
writing; and yet the writing conveys precisely a set of events that
are bound together neither through probable cause nor logical
induction. So the writing effectively opens up the disjunction
between clarity we might even say a certain lucidity and purity of
prose and the horror that is normalised precisely as a
consequence of that lucidity. No one can fault the grammar and
syntax of Kafkas writing, and no one has ever found emotional
excess in his tone; but precisely because of this apparently
objective and rigorous mode of writing, a certain horror opens up in
the midst of the quotidian, perhaps also an unspeakable grief.
Syntax and theme are effectively at war, which means that we
might think twice about praising Kafka only for his lucidity. After all,
the lucid works as style only insofar as it betrays its own claim to
self-sufficiency. Something obscure, if not unspeakable, opens up
within the perfect syntax. Indeed, if we consider that recurrent and
libellous accusations lurk in the background of his many trials, we

can read the narrative voice as a neutralisation of outrage, a

linguistic packing away of sorrow that paradoxically brings it to the
fore. So Jews are his family, his small world, and he is already in
some sense hemmed in by that small apartment, that relentless
community, and in that sense suffocated. And yet, he was mindful
of the stories and present dangers of anti-semitism, ones that he
experienced directly in a riot that took place in 1918 in which he
found himself amid a crowd swimming in Jew-hatred. Did he then
look to Zionism as a way out of this profound ambivalence: the
need to flee the constraints of family and community coupled with
the need to find a place imagined as free of anti-semitism?
Consider the very first letter Kafka wrote to Felice in September
1912. In the opening line, he asks her to picture him together with
her in Palestine:
In the likelihood that you no longer have even the remotest recollection
of me, I am introducing myself once more: my name is Franz Kafka, and I
am the person who greeted you for the first time that evening at
Director Brods in Prague, the one who subsequently handed you across
the table, one by one, photographs of a Thalia trip, and who finally, with
the very hand now striking the keys, held your hand, the one which
confirmed a promise to accompany him next year to Palestine.

As the correspondence unfolds over the next few years, Kafka lets
her know time and again that he will really not be able to
accompany her, not on this trip or on another, and certainly not to
Palestine, at least not in this life as the person that he is: the hand
that strikes the keys will not be holding her hand. Moreover, he has
his doubts about Zionism and about ever arriving at that
destination. He subsequently calls it a dream, and chides her a
few years later for entertaining Zionism so seriously: You flirted
with it, he wrote. But actually, he was the one who introduced
Palestine as the structure of flirtation: come with me, take my hand
to the beyond. Indeed, as the relationship founders and breaks
over the next few years, he makes clear that he has no intention of
going, and that he thinks those who do go are pursuing an illusion.
Palestine is a figural elsewhere where lovers go, an open future,
the name of an unknown destination.

In Kafka Goes to the Movies, Hanns Zischler makes the case that
filmic images provided Kafka with a primary means of access to the
space of Palestine, and that Palestine was a film image for him, a
projected field of fantasy. Zischler writes that Kafka saw the
beloved land in film, as film. Indeed, Palestine was imagined as
unpopulated, which has been ably confirmed by Ilan Pappes work
on early Zionist photography, in which Palestinian dwellings are
quickly renamed as part of the natural landscape. Zischlers is an
interesting thesis, but is probably not quite true, since the first of
those films were not seen until 1921 according to the records we
have, and Kafka was avidly attending meetings and reading
journals, gaining a sense of Palestine as much from stories written
and told as from public debates. In the course of those debates and
reports, Kafka understood that there were conflicts emerging in the
region. Indeed, his short story Jackals and Arabs, published in Der
Jude in 1917, registers an impasse at the heart of Zionism. In that
story, the narrator, who has wandered unknowingly into the desert,
is greeted by the Jackals (die Schakale) a thinly disguised reference
to the Jews. After treating him as a Messianic figure for whom they
have been waiting for generations, they explain that his task is to
kill the Arabs with a pair of scissors (perhaps a joke about how
Jewish tailors from Eastern Europe are ill equipped for conflict).
They dont want to do it themselves, since it would not be clean,
but the Messiah is himself apparently unbound by kosher
constraints. The narrator then speaks with the Arab leader, who
explains that its common knowledge; so long as Arabs exist, that
pair of scissors goes wandering through the desert and will wander
with us to the end of our days. Every European is offered it for the
great work; every European is just the Man that Fate has chosen
for them.
The story was written and published in 1917, the year Kafkas
relationship with Felice came to an end. That same year, he
clarifies to her in a letter: I am not a Zionist. Slightly earlier he
writes of himself to Grete Bloch that by temperament, he is a man
excluded from every soul-sustaining community on account of his
non-Zionist (I admire Zionism and am nauseated by it), nonpractising Judaism. After attending a meeting of Zionists in March
1915 with Max Brod, at which Jews from Eastern and Western
Europe came together to sort out their differences, he describes

the various characters, one with his shabby little jacket, and notes
the diabolically unpleasant smile of a little fellow described as a
walking argument with a canary voice. This visual sequence
finally includes himself: I, as if made of wood, a clothes-rack
pushed into the middle of the room. And yet hope.
From where precisely does this hope emerge? Here as elsewhere,
the problem of destination touches on the question of emigrating
to Palestine, but also on the problem, more generally, of whether
messages can arrive and commands be rightly understood. Nonarrival describes the linguistic predicament of writing in a
multilingual context, exploiting the syntactical rules of formal
German to produce an uncanny effect, but also writing in a
contemporary Babel where the misfires of language come to
characterise the everyday situation of speech, whether amorous or
political. The question that re-emerges in parables like An Imperial
Message is whether a message can be sent from here to there, or
whether someone can travel from here to there, or indeed over
there whether an expected arrival is really possible.
I would like to consider briefly two parables that touch on this
problem of non-arrival, even the strange form of hope that can
emerge from the broken sociality and counter-messianic impasse
that characterise the parable form. My Destination begins with
the problem of a command that is not understood: I gave orders
for my horse to be brought round from the stable. The servant did
not understand me. The command is perhaps given in a language
that the servant does not understand, or else some presumptive
hierarchy is no longer working as it is supposed to. More cognitive
confusion ensues as the first-person narrator continues: In the
distance I heard a bugle call, I asked him what this meant. This
time, it appears the servant understands the question, but the
narrator is still not living in a common world of sound: He knew
nothing and had heard nothing. Apparently the servant only gave
signs to indicate as much, though in the next line, he establishes
his linguistic competence: At the gate he stopped me, asking,
Where are you riding to, master?, which is followed by an
immediate reply: I dont know. I said only away from here [wegvon-hier], away from here. And then a third time: Always away
from here, only by doing so can I reach my destination. The

servant, who apparently did not understand the first command, or

did not understand himself as addressed by it, now seems anxious
to verify what the master actually knows about his goal (das Ziel).
But the masters answer is confounding: Yes, he replies, didnt I
say so? and then offers a place name, the hyphenated place
away-from-here (which becomes a term by which Deleuze links
Kafka with a project of deterritorialisation). And yet, what does it
mean to say away-from-here is my destination? Any place that is
not here can be away from here, but any place that becomes a
here will not be away from here, but only another here. Is there
really any way away from here, or does here follow us wherever
we go? What would it mean to be freed of the spatio-temporal
conditions of the here? We would not only have to be elsewhere,
but that very elsewhere would have to transcend the spatiotemporal conditions of any existing place. So wherever he means
to go, it will not be a place as we know a place to be. Is this a
theological parable, one that figures an ineffable beyond? Is it a
parable about Palestine, the place that in the imagination of the
European, according to Kafka, is not a populated place, not a place
that can be populated by any one?
In fact, he appears to be going somewhere where the sustenance
of the human body will prove unnecessary. The servant remarks:
You have no provision [Evorrat] with you. I need none, I said.
The Journey is so long that I must die of hunger if I dont get
anything on the way. No provisions can save me [Kein Evorrat
kann mich retten]. And then comes the strange concluding
sentence: For it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey. In the
German, it is luckily (zum Glck eine wahrhaft ungeheure Reise).
That word ungeheure means uncanny, monstrous, even
unfathomable. So we might well ask what is this monstrous and
unfathomable journey for which no food will be necessary. No food
can save him from this lucky venture into the uncanny zone.
Luckily, it seems the journey will not only require his starvation but
will fail to save him, to keep him in a place that is a place. He is
going to a place that is no place and where no food will be
necessary. If that place beyond place is itself a salvation, which is
not precisely said, then it will be of a different kind from the one
that food supplies to a living creature. We might call this a death
drive toward Palestine, but we might also read it as an opening

onto an infinite journey, or a journey into the infinite, that will

gesture towards another world. I say gesture because it is the
term that Benjamin and Adorno use to talk about these stilled
moments, these utterances that are not quite actions, that freeze
or congeal in their thwarted and incomplete condition. And that
seems to be what happens here: a gesture opens up a horizon as a
goal, but there is no actual departure and there is surely no actual
arrival.
The poetics of non-arrival can be found again in Kafkas parable
The Coming of the Messiah, where we learn from an apparently
authoritative voice that the Messiah will come when there is no
one to destroy this possibility and no one to suffer its destruction.
The parable refers to an unbridled individualism of faith that must
first become possible; the German for unbridled (zgellos) is
closer to let loose an individualism let loose on the world, even
out of control. Apparently, no one will make this come about, and it
seems as if the Messiah will not take anthropomorphic form: the
Messiah will come only when there is no one to destroy the
possibility or to suffer the destruction, which means that the
Messiah will not come when there is one, only when there is no
one, and that means as well that the Messiah will not be anyone,
will not be an individual. This must be the result of a certain
individualism that destroys each and every individual. Following
the Book of Matthew, the parable claims that the graves will open
themselves and so, again, we are given to understand that they
will not be opened by any human agency. When the narrator then
claims that this is Christian doctrine too, he retroactively marks
the opening of the parable as a Jewish one, but in fact there is a
Babel of religions already in place: Judaism, Christianity,
individualism, and then, after a garbled explanation, it seems that
there are bits of Hegel in the description as well indeed, the most
unreadable bits. In fact, it seems that no coherent description is
possible, and we are brought up against the limits of what can be
thought. The Messiah will come only when he is no longer
necessary. He will come only on the day after his arrival; he will
come, not on the last day, but on the very last. It would seem that
the Messiah comes precisely when there is no one there to suffer
the destruction of the world as we know it, when there is no one
left who can destroy his coming. That Messiah arrives not as an

individual, and surely not within any temporal sequence that we

take to organise the world of living beings. If he comes on the very
last day, but not the last, he comes on a day now
hyperfigurative that is beyond any calendar of days, and beyond
chronology itself. The parable posits a temporality in which no one
will survive. Arrival is a concept that belongs to the calendar of
days, but coming (das Kommen) apparently not. It does not
happen at a moment in time, but only after the sequence of all
moments is completed.
Departure and arrival were constant issues for European Jews who
were considering leaving Europe for Palestine, but also for other
sites of emigration. In My Destination, we were left with the
question of how can one go away from here without moving from
one here to another? Does such a departure and arrival not
assume a distinct temporal trajectory across a spatial continuum?
The amalgam Weg-von-hier appears to be a place name only to
confound our very notion of place. Indeed, although Weg-von-Hier
is a place name it holds the name of the place within a
recognisable grammatical form it turns out that grammar not
only diverges from clear referentiality in this instance, but can,
clearly, operate at odds with any intelligible reality. There seems to
be no clear way of moving from point to point within the scheme
offered in this parable, and this confounds our ideas of temporal
progression and spatial continuity. It even makes it difficult to
follow the lines on the page, to start the parable and end it. If
Kafkas parable in some ways charts the departure from a common
notion of place for a notion of perpetual non-arrival, then it does
not lead towards a common goal or the progressive realisation of a
social goal within a specific place.
Something else is opened up, the monstrous and infinite distance
between departure and arrival and outside the temporal order in
which those terms make sense. In The Coming of the Messiah,
Kafkas view of non-arrival departs from Jewish sources, starts from
there and leaves it there. What becomes clear is that whatever
temporality is marked by the Messianic is not realisable within
space and time. It is a counter-Kantian moment, perhaps, or a way
of interrogating Judaism at the limits of a Kantian notion of
appearance and over and against a progressive notion of history
whose aim is to be realised in a populated territory.

Kafka also reflects on forms of non-arrival in a diary entry written in

1922, less than two years before he died of tuberculosis:
I have not shown the faintest firmness of resolve in the conduct of my
life. It was as if I, like everyone else, had been given a point from which
to prolong the radius of a circle, and had then, like everyone else, to
describe my perfect circle round this point. Instead, I was forever
starting my radius only constantly to be forced at once to break it off.
(Examples: piano, violin, languages, Germanics, anti-Zionism, Zionism,
Hebrew, gardening, carpentering, writing, marriage attempts, an
apartment of my own.)

It sounds lamentable, but then he adds: If I sometimes prolonged

the radius a little further than usual, in the case of my law studies,
say, or engagements, everything was made worse rather than
better just because of this little extra distance. So does this mean
that something was made better by breaking off the radius of a
circle, resisting that particular closure? Kafka makes the political
implications of his oblique theology clear, or almost clear, when he
writes in January 1922 of the wild pursuit that is his writing.
Perhaps not a pursuit, he conjectures; maybe his writing is an
assault on the last earthly frontier like all such writing. He then
remarks: If Zionism had not intervened, it might easily have
developed into a new secret doctrine, a Kabbalah. There are
intimations of this.
I have tried to suggest that in Kafkas parables and other writings
we find brief meditations on the question of going somewhere, of
going over, of the impossibility of arrival and the unrealisability of a
goal. I want to suggest that many of these parables seem to
allegorise a way of checking the desire to emigrate to Palestine,
opening instead an infinite distance between the one place and the
other and so constitute a non-Zionist theological gesture.
We might, finally, consider this poetics of non-arrival as it pertains
to Kafkas own final bequest. As should be clear by now, many of
Kafkas works are about messages written and sent where the
arrival is uncertain or impossible, about commands given and
misunderstood and so obeyed in the breach or not obeyed at all.
An Imperial Message charts the travels of a messenger through

several layers of architecture, as he finds himself caught up in a

dense and infinite grid of people: an infinite barrier emerges
between the message and its destination. So what do we say about
the request that Kafka made of Brod before he died? Dearest Max,
My last request: Everything I leave behind me to be burned
unread. Kafkas will is a message sent, to be sure, but it does not
become Brods will; indeed Brods will, figuratively and literally,
obeys and refuses Kafkas will (some of the work will remain
unread, but none of it will be burned, at least not by Brod).
Interestingly, Kafka does not ask for all the writings back so that he
can continue to destroy them himself. On the contrary, he leaves
Brod with the conundrum. His letter to Brod is a way of giving all
the work to Brod, and asking Brod to be the one responsible for its
destruction. There is an insurmountable paradox here, since the
letter becomes part of the writing, and so part of the very corpus
or work, like so many of Kafkas letters that have been
meticulously preserved over the years. And yet the letter makes a
demand to destroy the writing, which would logically entail the
nullification of the letter itself, and so nullify even the command
that it delivers. So is this command a clear directive, or is it a
gesture in the sense that Benjamin and Adorno described? Does he
expect his message to reach its destination, or does he write the
request knowing that messages and commands fail to reach those
to whom they are addressed, knowing that they will be subject to
the same non-arrival about which he wrote? Remember it was
Kafka who wrote:
How on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with
one another by letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person
who is near one can catch hold all else goes beyond human strength.
Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts,
something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses dont reach their
destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this
ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses
this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the
ghostly element between people and to create a natural communication,
the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the
aeroplane. But its no longer any good, these are evidently inventions
being made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much

calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the
telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts wont starve, but
we will perish.

Had the works been destroyed, perhaps the ghosts would not be
fed though Kafka could not have anticipated how limitlessly
parasitic the forces of nationalism and profit would be, even as he
knew those spectral forces were waiting. So in the act of dying,
Kafka writes that he wants the work destroyed after his death. Is
this to say that the writing is tied to his living, and that with his
own demise, so too should come the demise of his work? As I die,
so too should my work cease to exist. A fantasy, to be sure, that it
will not outlive him, something that he finds too painful. It reminds
me of the parable The Cares of a Family Man, which claimed the
attention of Adorno for its salvational promise. There is Odradek,
some creature, a spool, a star, whose laugh sounds like the rustling
of leaves, hovering in or beneath or near the stairwell of a house.
Perhaps he is a son, or the remnant of a son; in any case, he is part
object and part echo of a human presence. It is only at the end of
the parable that it seems the rigorously neutral voice who
describes this Odradek has a generational relation to him. This
Odradek does not quite live in time, since he is described as falling
down the steps perpetually, that is, in perpetuity. Thus the narrator
who seems to be in the position of a father remarks: It almost
pains me to think that he might outlive me. Can we read this as an
allegory not just for Kafka in his fathers house, but for Kafkas
writing, the rustling pages, the ways in which Kafka himself
became part human and part object, without progeny, or rather
with a literary progeny he found nearly too painful to imagine
surviving him? The great value of Odradek for Adorno was that he
was absolutely useless in a capitalist world that sought to
instrumentalise all objects for its gain. It was however not just the
spectres of technology that would eagerly feed on Kafkas work,
but those forms of profit-making that exploit even the most antiinstrumental forms of art, and those forms of nationalism that seek
to appropriate even the modes of writing that most rigorously
resist them. An irony then, to be sure, that Kafkas writings finally
became someone elses stuff, packed into a closet or a vault,
transmogrified into exchange value, awaiting their afterlife as an
icon of national belonging or, quite simply, as money.